Poutine #Hottakes: Two Canadians Clash Over a Montreal Specialty

According to Canadian Noah Bernamoff, we’ll never know the true origin of poutine. And it doesn’t really matter. But as anyone who grew up in the Canadian province of its birth is aware, the dish—French fries drenched in gravy and covered in cheese curds—has a time and a place.

“You eat it late at night,” he says. “You eat it in a hockey rink in Bumblefuck, Quebec.”

Nonetheless, Bernamoff, a native Montrealer, serves plenty of it to Americans from all walks of life, and at all times of day, at New York’s Mile End, the delicatessen he owns. To foreigners, it serves as an emblem of all things Canadian. And while poutine is far from a great point of contention among natives of that country, they resent seeing their culinary culture reduced to one greasy dish.

Despite its simplicity, though, that dish is not without its nuances. On the most basic level, solid iterations of all three ingredients should guarantee a good poutine. But, as Bernamoff explains, companies in Quebec have developed poutine powder—"almost a sauce thickener"—by which some people swear, even if it sounds like a lackluster way to make gravy. Meanwhile, stateside, diners have begun to serve bastardized forms of poutine, peddling versions like disco fries, a plate that trades the requisite cheddar curd for a queso-like cheese sauce.

Few things unite Quebecers, a group divided by the enormously complicated politics of language, but poutine might be one of them. Still, there are holdouts. Here, two writers raised in Montreal, Lucas Wisenthal and Erik Leijon, debate one of the province’s least pressing issues: whether or not the seven-decade-old dish is trash.

Why Poutine is Garbage

Lucas Wisenthal is editor-in-chief of the RIDE Channel, a site that, mercifully, has nothing to do with poutine. Follow him@lucaswisenthal

I want to say there’s nothing good about poutine, but that would be a lie. There are three great things about it: French fries, gravy, cheese curds. But a dish premised around the former soaking up the latter two, absorbing their flavor or whatever, is utterly inedible. And if you think I have no right to say this, you’re wrong: As a near-lifelong Montrealer, I’ve spent most of my years around poutine, watching people like Erik devour plate upon plate of it. But I’ve never eaten it. And I never will.

In the interest of full disclosure, while I’m indeed from Montreal, I was raised in a predominantly English-speaking suburb of the city, where classic casse-croutes were rare. Poutine first penetrated my consciousness sometime around 1990 or ‘91. Yes, people had been eating it for decades, but I’d like to think that the dish—which, according to the World’s Most Accurate Encyclopedia, originated in the 1950s, in towns geographically and culturally distant from mine—experienced some sort of great crossover moment at the time. Suddenly it was everywhere, my suburban enclave included.

It crossed borders, too. The idea of fries smothered in gravy and cheese curds somehow proved intriguing to Americans and other foreigners, my wife included. I once watched her wolf down a plate of steamed hot-dog poutine at La Banquise, a well-known Montreal greasy spoon. Also on the menu: a smoked-meat concoction. The mere idea of that one nauseated me.

But maybe it should have inspired a great sense of national pride from deep within my unpatriotic being. Here was poutine, a uniquely French-Canadian dish, cross-pollinated with smoked meat, a Montreal-Jewish staple I didn’t enjoy until I was 26. In New York terms, though, it amounted to pastrami pizza. Which is to say: No, thank you.

As I got older, the pressure to eat poutine intensified. A night out almost always concluded with a visit to La Belle Province, Quebec’s pre-eminent steamed hot-dog chain; for my friends, the dish was the go-to, the supposed absorber of alcohol. While my refusal to eat it never drew the ire of others—who really cares if one drunk college dude prefers his fries with ketchup and ketchup only?—I knew I was alone in my resistance.

Quebecers like Erik, meanwhile, contentedly defile their fries with foods that have no business on or near them, believing them to be vessels akin to tacos, where basically anything goes. Fries, gravy, cheese curds, pepperoni, bacon, and onions at 3:30 a.m.? Sounds good, bruh, but I have some self-respect.

More than even Erik, though, I’ve argued about this subject with my wife, an American who, it’s worth noting, couldn’t leave Quebec quickly enough. It all amounts to the same thing: Poutine looks bad and smells bad, and I’m sure it tastes bad. So I’ll never eat it, no matter the circumstances.

“It sort of seems like you’re making something out of nothing,” my wife said of this debate—a term I use loosely, because there is none. “Just try the fucking French fries.”

Never.

Why Poutine is Fire

Erik Leijon is a writer based in Montreal. He realized long ago there's no point running away from his poutine eating heritage. Follow him @elejion

My obdurate friend and I have had this conversation on numerous occasions in some of Montreal’s finest old-time diners. I can recall one particular 3am post-drinking meal at greasy spoon, Chez Claudette, in Montreal’s Mile End neighborhood. I went with the glorious Dalton, which adds a bunch of peas to your standard poutine, while Lucas pawed at a drab hamburger. It was painful to watch him deprive himself of such gooey goodness. And for what? To be the one guy in Montreal who doesn’t eat poutine? It’s high time he give in to the poutine’s symphony of flavors and textures.

Poutine is pure comfort food for the Quebecois soul. Poutine is a warm embrace after a night out on the town. It’s a reminder of pit stops during family drives through small-town Quebec, where the dish was created sometime in the late 50s. It can be as simple as fries, gravy and cheese curds in a takeout container, or it can be re-imagined for fine dining with foie gras and lobster. (I once ate a potato gnocchi fry poutine with seal sausages on top, so really anything’s possible.) To dislike such a versatile dish suitable for any taste or mood is nothing short of willful ignorance, since a poutine can be redone any which way. There are even dessert poutines for those with a sweet tooth—try a maple syrup-laden sucrée-salée if you can. Just when I think I’ve grown weary of the standard poutine, some cook comes up with a new concoction and I fall in love all over again.

Seriously, if you had a poutine that left you cold, then change it up. Don’t like soggy potatoes? Then roll back on the gravy. Curds too squeaky? Try another kind of cheese. The days of poutine purity—the three ingredients and nothing else—are long over. I’ll even squeeze a bit of ketchup on there, which might still be considered heretical in some parts. Poutine is basically just a catch-all term these days for anything with fries, cheese, and gravy. Saying you don’t like poutine is like saying you don’t like tacos. All tacos. Now who sounds unreasonable?

There’s also the matter of everyone latching on to the poutine craze, which I think has rubbed some Montrealers the wrong way. I too felt a sense of disappointment when I first heard a non-Quebecer—an Ontarian, to be specific—ordering a poutine at the now-shuttered La Belle Province on St. Catherine Street near Bishop with a drunken anglo slur, but my tune has changed regarding the co-opting of Quebec’s signature dish. Sort of like when Celine Dion starting singing in English, I’ve grown to appreciate poutine’s exportability. The poutine has grown and flourished, and so too should the palettes of those who disliked it in its original form.

What was once Quebec’s best-kept secret can now be found in cities like New York, and it warms my heart—not unlike like the chicken-stock poutine gravy at A.A. in Montreal’s St. Henri neighborhood. Time to open your mind and mouth to the possibilities.

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